urge parliamentary scrutiny of the state within a state of the Khakis, especially the dreaded spy agency (DGFI). The interference of the Khakis into state politics will once again jeopardize institutionalization of elective democracy, good governance and secularism. The rogues fear social justice activists, critics, politicians and journalists too - Joy Manush!

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Bangladesh’s volatile politics: The battling begums

The pendulum swings away from Sheikh Hasina
and her government

AHEAD of the festival of Eid-al-Fitr on
August 9th-11th, the two quarrelling heads of Bangladesh’s political dynasties
exchanged greetings cards. But the outward signs of peace between the prime
minister, Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League, and the opposition leader, Khaleda
Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), mean little. A European diplomat
says he has just sent two cables to his capital. The first discusses the
growing chances of the League’s defeat in elections due by next January. The
second is about the dynastic succession plans of the battling begums.

One political party is likely to be missing
at the coming election. On August 1st the High Court ruled that the country’s
biggest religious party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, is unfit to contest national
polls because its charter puts God above democratic process. The court has
cancelled Jamaat’s registration. A few months ago this might have sealed
victory for the League, for Jamaat has been a crucial vote-winning ally for BNP.

Yet growing numbers now doubt whether the
League can win a second consecutive term, and not only because no elected
government has ever done so in Bangladesh.
In early 2013 judgments by a flawed but popular court, investigating crimes
committed by current Jamaat members during Bangladesh’s
war of independence from Pakistan
in 1971, seemed to boost the nominally secular League, which revived the
tribunal. Nearly all the leaders of Jamaat are likely to be sentenced, probably
to death, by election day.

In response, the opposition framed the
trials as a struggle between anti-Islamist forces and the pious. That paved the
way for marches on Dhaka, the capital, by
Hefazat-e-Islam, an Islamic splinter group with fundamentalist demands. The
second time they marched, security forces killed up to 50 of them. The message
young men took back to their villages was that thousands had been slaughtered. Across
the country, the effect on the government’s popularity has been devastating.

Ever since, the BNP has been in the
ascendant. It thrashed the League in mayoral elections in June and July, notably
in Gazipur in the industrial belt, hitherto one of the League’s safest
constituencies.

In an attempt to reverse its fortunes, the
government plans to raise wages for 4m garment workers, who are angry at its
failure to make factories safe and to compensate relatives of more than 1,100
killed in a ghastly factory collapse in May. A wage rise could sway many voters,
but factory bosses are likely to resist a deal. A push against party corruption
would also boost Sheikh Hasina’s popularity. A good third of her MPs dare not
visit their fiefs for fear of being lynched for treating their constituencies
as cash tills. Yet no precedent exists for firing miscreants, and appointing
credible candidates would probably split the party. As a last resort, Sheikh
Hasina’s son and heir apparent, Sajeeb Wazed, was handed around for three weeks
in July before flying back to the United States. At this point, he
looks like a non-starter.

His dynastic counterpart, Tarique Rahman, Mrs
Zia’s son, is wilier. He would jump on a plane from London tomorrow. His mother is in poor health
and keen to pass power to her first-born. But he faces charges of corruption
and money laundering in Bangladesh:
Mr Rahman was instrumental in ensuring that the BNP’s last stint in power was a
glorious plunder. He would go straight to jail unless the League agrees in the
coming weeks to pass control of the country’s institutions to a caretaker
government for the elections, a sticking-point that could trigger a
constitutional crisis.

The League will fight bitterly. But if it
loses an election, the BNP would rehabilitate its disgraced heir and its Jamaat
allies (at least, those not executed by then). Once a party is in power in Bangladesh it
is the unalterable tradition to declare nearly everything decreed by your
opponents to be null and void.